


The Handover

by TheGreatLibraryFangirl (Mazeem)



Series: Gaps in Canon [1]
Category: The Great Library Series - Rachel Caine
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Time Travel, briefly, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:42:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26107402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mazeem/pseuds/TheGreatLibraryFangirl
Summary: Keria Morning prepares to become the next Obscurist Magnus, but there are still long-held secrets that she doesn't know.
Series: Gaps in Canon [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1318670
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	The Handover

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read the Keria Morning short by Rachael Caine on Wattpad, this will make slightly less sense than it might otherwise do. Check it out here: https://www.wattpad.com/276596111-the-great-library-tigers-in-the-cage/
> 
> If you read the latter half of Chapter 5 of Sword and Pen before reading this, you can laugh at how much I've taken from there to create this.

Keria Morning knocked on the Obscurist Magnus’ office door. 

“Enter,” he said, sounding as sharp as ever. 

“You wanted to see me, sir?” She opened the door and took her usual seat at the desk in front of him. Afternoon sun warmed the wood underneath her fingertips. She looked at the pale patches rather than at what daylight made of the man before her. 

Almost a year had passed since he had officially renounced his son Gregory as the next Obscurist Magnus and put her in line instead. Almost the full year that the Medica Magnus had allotted him. 

He still sat ramrod straight in his chair and spoke like the world had wronged him in its ignorance, and there had been a period of time where that was enough - where only the most gifted amongst them, like her, could sense the dimming life inside him. But in more recent days his face had pinched and shrunken in on itself, and his movements had grown stiff and slow. 

He’d handed more and more of his duties over to her. So much of it was petty politics, petty maneuvering of petty people. She hated them all, but she was trapped on this path. Trapped again. Trapped everywhere. 

“Something a little more interesting for you today than fielding the Archivist’s demands for more output.”

He slid a box across the desk, stopping just before the touch of her hands. She looked up at him in surprise, and he raised his eyebrows impatiently. 

Bewildered, she opened the box. Inside, as she had anticipated from the dimensions of its container, lay a ring. It held a large amber stone, emblazoned with the gold seal of the Library.

It somehow felt much, much … larger … than its visible size. One of those, then. She’d been introduced to a few storage devices by now. All dated from nearly a thousand years ago, when the Obscurists had been young and free and brimming with the energy of the world. 

“Not exactly my taste,” she said, flippantly. Then a thought struck her. She could feel the power in the ring. More than she’d ever felt in one space before. “Sir, is this what has been keeping you alive?”

He snorted with laughter. She flinched at the sound, convinced at first by its unfamiliarity that he must be choking instead. “That would be … unlikely.” His teeth bared in a smile she didn’t understand. “Take it.”

“What is it, then?” Her voice was firm, but she picked up the ring anyway. Following his orders. 

A dancing speck of red floated in the amber stone, and she squinted at it. Too red to be rust. Some other sort of impurity?

“This was made by Gargi Vachaknavi,” the Obscurist Magnus said. 

Keria caught her breath. She’d learned about this woman. Gargi had lived hundreds of years before the founding of the Library, and according to the Vedic Sanskrit texts had been a brilliant philosopher, winning the respect of men all around her. She had debated on the existence of what Hindus still called Braham, but which Keria had been taught by the name _Apeiron_. 

“A force that is potential in all things, that exists and does not exist, that underlies even the quintessence of force that makes up the basis of all matter,” she quoted from a remembered text. 

“Precisely.”

“Does this ring contain apeiron?”

“Everything does,” he snapped back, all satisfaction gone. 

Keria bit her lip to avoid responding. She _knew_ that. She’d only wondered, because this ring felt so … strange. Heavy, even though she hadn’t yet put it on. From everything that she’d learnt, it wouldn’t be at all unlike the Library to harness such a power and grant it only to the Curia. Even her daily life showed that. 

(When she was Obscurist Magnus, she would see about extending the electrical frameworks further.)

Well. Let’s see what it is, then. She slid the ring onto her right hand. First her ring finger, then her middle. It didn’t quite sit right anywhere. 

Then she stopped caring about trivialities such as fit. 

Power flowed over her in an unstoppable wave, filling her mouth and nose and very soul with its strange, primal tang. 

Would the ocean taste like this? She’d always wondered what the great, beautiful expanse of water outside their windows would taste like. Experiments adding salt to her drinking water hadn’t been pleasant. 

Oh no, obviously thinking about the ocean was a bad idea in such unknown circumstances. She couldn’t see the Obscurist Magnus anymore. There was water all around her, shifting gently and endlessly. 

The golden power still rushed into her, pulling her downwards like a whirlpool, that raw force of nature the Greeks personified as Charybdis that she had only ever seen exemplified in lessons with faucets and plugholes. 

Her nose and mouth were plugged by the onslaught. There was no way to breathe. 

Surely?

Except when she fought past the panic and tried anyway - she could. 

Sat across from her now was a young woman, dressed in a yellow sari. 

“Are you Gargi?” Keria asked. Her words bubbled from her lips and made no sound. She felt another rush of panic. 

Gargi - for it must be, surely? - held out her hand. Keria took it. 

The meeting of the hands caused their strange environment to shake and swirl, with a shock like an earthquake. Those Keria _did_ have personal experience of. 

Images floated in front of her eyes, lacking any sort of order or sense. 

An old man that she didn’t recognise, staring at her with hatred in his tear-filled face. Herself in the gold-trimmed Obscurist Magnus robes. Her grandmother, giving her a present as the family celebrated her revealed Obscurist powers. 

A bedraggled man who looked so like Eskander that she cried out - for she had more feelings for Pallis than she had yet admitted to and this figure had Eskander’s eyes. She’d never seen Eskander’s eyes look like that, though. Not in his darkest moments.

Never, if she could help it. 

The seal of the Great Library floated before her, golden and eternal. 

Gargi let go of her hand. 

_Nearly_ , said a soft voice in her head, then with a flick of her wrist Gargi sent Keria soaring through the waves, up and up, faster and faster.

The pressure receded just as she thought she might burst asunder. 

Keria seized control of her absurd desire to gasp for air, and stared across the desk at the Obscurist Magnus. 

He was staring at her with that peculiar gaze that meant he was seeing her quintessence. Perhaps more, now. It wasn’t a gift she had been provided with, for all her power.

“What was that?” she demanded.

He shrugged. “A test. How do you feel?”

She considered her answer for a moment. Empty. Shocked. Ringing with the echo of that power, like a struck bell. 

Relieved that the slick, choking stretch of it had been removed from her. Did that mean she had passed, or failed?

“Fine.” She glared at him. “What might have happened?”

He shrugged again, and winced. “Gargi told me I was a stain upon the earth. I was informed her tongue has grown sharper in recent history.” He stood up. “Put it back in the box. Try it on your successor. One day that power will be available to the Obscurists again. Right now. I have something more tangible to show you.”

Keria got to her feet too, mulling over that soft word spoken into her head. She hadn’t passed, then. Neither had her predecessors, by the sounds of things. For how long? Since the enclosure of the Tower? How could she find out more?

She followed the Obscurist Magnus in a daze, noting only vaguely the stiffness in his gait and the occasional grunts. Eventually that sank in, and she frowned. He didn't waste his limited energy without very good reason. 

“Where are we going, sir?” she asked, as the lift passed the floor for his office. He stayed silent until they stepped out into the peaceful beauty of the garden. 

Then he turned to face her. Sunlight fell across his face, in just that terrible, wrong way that it had been doing recently. 

“Somewhere unbearable,” said the living skull facing her. 

She shuddered, but defiantly stepped towards him anyway. There was nothing to fear. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you're a details fanatic like I am, and especially if you DID reread that Sword and Pen chapter directly before this, you might notice I've fucked around with canon a bit to make Gargi Vachaknavi's background fit the real life details. I think it makes much more sense that way. 
> 
> Also, Word of God spoiler 
> 
> \- if you like to interpret works yourself, look away - 
> 
> they are, of course, about to step into the Black Archives.


End file.
